Der Weg nach Eden

People die, every day, every minute, every second. People also die in movies, sometimes the body-count is one of the greatest assets of a movie. But what happens after we die? Here movies usually turn to the living. They mourn, they are shocked, they live on. This documentary is about the dead and about what happens to them after they die. Not in a metaphysical sense. No, it follows those, who handle the corpses, those, who 'post-process' them. Here, the topic of modern medicine enters the stage. Autopsy may not be the standard procedure, but it is a common phenomenon not only in the case of 'suspicious' deaths - as most movies want make us believe. There is another motive for autopsy: Order, science, and - in the case of the expert introduced in this documentary: mere craftsmanship. And here, besides the strong pictures of routines which are about taking apart corpses - the extraordinary quality of this movie lies: Respect for the death, respect for humanity can also express itself through bureaucratic regulations, which involve systematic mangling of bodies with knifes and scalpels. There is no black-and-white dualism between following of technical rules and the mystery of death. The truth is somewhere in-between or beyond.